IBM Research - Zurich offers the opportunity to do a PhD in close cooperation between the Lab and a university. PhD students are employed by IBM and enroll as external PhD candidates at a university that is jointly selected by the student, the IBM mentor and and the university professor. A PhD contract usually lasts for an initial three years, with an optional fourth year. During this period, students are expected to work on site at our Lab, but also have regular interactions with their professors.

Doing a PhD at IBM Research - Zurich is rewarding and challenging at the same time: The close interaction with an experienced IBM researcher and a university professor allows students to get insights into very challenging real-world problems and to tackle these problems with state-of-the-art science. Commonly, it turns out that the state of the art needs to be pushed to a new level in order to solve a problem fully, and this leads to the definition of exciting doctoral research projects. Applying research to a real-world problem without being able to constrain it to idealizing conditions poses many challenges that allow the PhD students to develop their technical and non-technical skills.

A successful PhD project usually leads to publications at top-level conferences and in journals, allowing students to establish themselves in the academic community and to meet the scientific leaders in their field. Integrating their technology into an IBM product enables them to develop advanced software software engineering skills and experience, and to interact with international development teams and customers.

Applicants must have a M.SC. in Computer Science with a very high grade-point average. They should also have a very solid knowledge of theoretical computer science, algorithms and data structures.

During the application process, we like to ask candidates to present their Master's thesis project. We then interview candidates regarding their computer science skills. In addition, a programming exercise must be solved and the solution discussed with us.